Writing
Intent
At Southwark Park, we aim to provide a wide and varied writing curriculum including a range of fiction, non-fiction and cross-curricular texts. Writing is a fundamental skill that enables children to succeed in all areas of the curriculum and encompasses speaking and listening skills such as drama and debating, as well as handwriting, spelling, grammar and punctuation proficiency.
Children at Southwark Park are given opportunities to write a wide variety of formal and informal text types including narrative writing, poetry, classic texts, balanced arguments, persuasion and newspaper reports and cross-curricular pieces such as scientific writing, historical recounts and non-chronological reports. The breadth of our curriculum aims to ensure that children across all key stages can adapt their writing skills between different subjects across a range of topics helping them to develop crucial and transferable skills. This allows children to express their creativity, organise and communicate their ideas and improve their language and vocabulary skills to develop as confident and articulate communicators.
Implementation
Over the last few years, we have worked with a range of consultants and specialists to develop our writing curriculum with a focus on engagement and motivation for all children as well as challenge and curriculum skill coverage. This has enabled us to secure a very clear progression of skills and knowledge from Year 1 to Year 6 ensuring that learning is built upon in consecutive years and therefore children are leaving at the end of KS2 as confident, resilient, independent and highly-skilled writers. Learning objectives and success criteria are shared at the beginning of writing lessons to allow the children to become autonomous learners with ownership of their progress towards the expected standards. In addition to this, our marking policy has been adapted to build in time for the children to edit and refine their own work alongside meaningful feedback from their teachers so that the whole process focuses on individualised and targeted teaching for the individual.
Impact
Our writing curriculum is designed and regularly updated to ensure that the children feel engaged, motivated and able to express their creativity in a range of ways. As they progress through the year groups, their knowledge and confidence when applying spelling, punctuation and grammar rules increases with teachers using marking and continuous assessment to target any misconceptions. The overriding goal of our curriculum is to ensure that every child leaves Southwark Park not only as a confident writer that can communicate effectively, but also with a love of writing as an outlet for imagination, creativity and self-expression.
To measure the impact of our curriculum, we use pupil voice alongside marking and assessment against the STAR (Southwark tracking and assessment record) for each year group. The STAR contains a list of writing and composition skills for each year group created by the borough of Southwark in line with National Curriculum targets. These include drafting, editing, composition, layout, writing for specific audiences, spelling, handwriting and punctuation. Lessons and units of work are designed around these allowing the progress from emerging, developing and then securing of the year group expectations. Bringing all of these elements together creates a clear picture of measurable success and progression for our children. Children’s writing is regularly celebrated, with a variety of displays across the school and classrooms as well as fortnightly Star Writer assemblies where the selected children’s work is shared with others across the school and certificates sent home to parents.
